Graeme and I were looking for a movie/show that would not scare our nephew who slept over this past weekend but would still be engaging for a 5/6 years olds. After perusing Netflix for awhile, we settled on the newer MLP series.

Well, the first episode, still ended up scaring him, but both boys found it entertaining. Graeme had already read reviews of it, so it was about what he expected, but I was surprised with the quality of the show._________________"Her kisses left something to be desired -- the rest of her. "

I've been pretty content to just sit back and let Equestria Daily compile decent brony music for my perusal, but they're pouring a lot of resources into making EQD Music their main brony music curation thingy, ostensibly to drop the Music of the Day posts that supply me with so much. So I'm looking at other options to get my brony music fix. Unfortunately this requires a rather *ugh* proactive approach.

The first thing to understand is that YOUTUBE IS TERRIBLE for finding new music. You'd think that being owned and operated by Google would make it easy to find what you're looking for, but that's not the case. Not only do obvious search terms fail, 90% of results are not brony related at all, and too many are in the forms of someone's playlist instead of an actual video. You really have to already know where something is in order to find it. And then what, you watch it? What about downloads? Usually these are made available via a Mediafire, tindeck, SoundCloud, etc. third-party link in the video's description, though sometimes the link has expired, the service has shutdown, or for whatever reason it doesn't work. Youtube-to-mp3 sites can be an option, but many are shady and often they run against the latest schemes Youtube uses to block that kind of thing.
What about SoundCloud, the Youtube of audio? Pretty much the same problem except it's less stable and search isn't as good. While it does tend to have downloads of music available for free (if the artist chooses), those are usually limited to the first 100 downloads only and then you're outta luck. Bandcamp? Don't get me started.

Fortunately, there are a few sites focusing exclusively on brony music. Music creator hubs/boards/sites like Toastbeard and My Little Remix are out there, but neither one is really meant for the general public's perusal or for finding new stuff. Mostly they're for the artists to challenge each other or hang out and talk shop. So far I've found three good sites for the kind of music hunting we're out to do.

Equestrian Beats is the grand-daddy of brony music hosting sites for the general public. It has a lot of big name and not-so-big-name fan musicians onboard, though a surprising number of the popular ones haven't been putting their recent materials there. It's also not the best for discovering new music. You have three basic categorical breakdowns (Random, Popular and by Artist), and each track has optional tags you can use (i.e. "metal," "fluttershy," etc.) but there's no way to really just search by tag. You can sign up for an account that lets you follow artists as they contribute, or even upload your own stuff.

Pony.fm is a new music hosting/ site, with shared accounts tied to MLP Forums. Signing up lets you favorite tracks, albums, and artists and get notifications when new stuff from your favorites are posted. It's still in beta, but pretty darn functional and seems to be growing pretty fast. It's kind of like eqbeats but with more focus on discoverability of new material and more ways to search.

Both sites let you follow a selected artist and assemble playlists. They offer free downloads in a variety of formats: FLAC, mp3, AAC, and Ogg. Eqbeats also offers files in Opus, and Pony.fm offers ALAC. It's also hard not to feel like these two are duplicating effort that could be better spend collaborating, building what they want into one service that combines their strengths, simplifying the music hosting/discovery process instead of Balkanizing it. I don't think there's any animosity, it's just kind of a waste. If eqbeats developed Pony.fm's search and categorization options, or if Pony.fm had all of eqbeats' library and contributors, it would be almost ideal!

EQD Music is Equestria Daily's idea to expose more talent in the fandom without having to host it themselves or perpetually compile Music of the Day posts. It's trying to emphasize discoverability and search, like Pony.fm. Also like Pony.fm, it's still in beta.
It's a lightly-curated site. Submissions are crowd-sourced and given the once-over by some of the EQD pre-listeners to weed out non-pony stuff, but it's not judged for quality control. So far it only accepts Youtube videos, which are embedded in the page and either played in a pop-up player or link back to the Youtube page depending on where you click.
It breaks the submissions down by three general features for its search function: Acoustic (including electric guitars and keyboards) vs. Electronic (as in Fruity Loops et al.), Vocal vs. Instrumental, and Original (including fan music remixes) vs. Show remix. Somehow the Search option does give you more control, like genre and artist.
Unlike the other two sites, EQD Music doesn't offer accounts and has no downloads. There's no way to follow artists, and there are no playlists. It's really just a way to sorta spotlight existing material in the community (mostly on Youtube, but SoundCloud support is "planned").

So far I like Pony.fm the best, but it's still new and there's not a ton of artists onboard yet. Eqbeats is well-established but rather spartan in terms of how you can find new music, and sometimes neglected like an old Livejournal. EQD Music is both spartan and new, but the content there is submitted by visitors instead of needing the artists to sign up so it's grown the fastest and covers pretty much the whole lifespan of brony music already.

Yeah, you'd think YouTube wouldn't be terrible, but there it is. It's not really designed for this sort of thing, anyway.

I did recently go perusing for new brony music there but, even though I'd barely updated my library in months(maybe added a couple of albums, mostly things from artists I already actively followed), almost all of the stuff that I found that I liked was stuff that I already had. It wasn't an unpleasant experience -- I just didn't find much of anything new._________________butts

I wonder if the producers really wanted to put this out and thought it'd be a hit because there has been so much fan art as them being humans...as well a bunch of fan edits of the show as them being human. O_O

I think they did it because yunger kids are all supposed to fantasize about being in high school. And fans of every series or book ever stick tehir fave characters in high school._________________[Stripeypants has enabled lurk mode.]